Data can be extremely beneficial for those looking to get more out of their B2B email marketing campaigns.
Whether you’re tracking general metrics like open and click-through rates or want to dive deeper and learn how users are interacting with your B2B website after receiving your communications, here are 5 key data points. We recommend reviewing these metrics when crafting and monitoring your clients’ B2B email marketing experience.
Email Open Rate
How can you tell if your email campaigns are resonating with your target audience?
Open rates are one of the best and easiest ways to tell whether your B2B email marketing strategy is working. The number of contacts that open your emails compared to the total number of contacts that your email was sent to determines your open rate.
One way to encourage better open rates is strategically coming up with clever subject lines that resonate with your audience and get them to click on your email. Subject lines should be concise, but also effective enough to communicate what the user can expect in the email. You can A/B test different variations of subject lines to gather more data and effectively improve open rates for future email sends.
Click-Through Rates
Is the data you are presenting to the reader engaging and informative?
Your click-through activity gives you a lot of insight into the content that resonates with your list. Higher click-throughs mean the featured content is important to your audience. If it’s a page on the website or a blog, you can use this information to add more related topics to your content calendar in the future. Testing variations of Call-to-Actions can help improve click-through rates.
By utilizing Google Analytics, you can view what kind of activity users are taking after they click on your email. In the Acquisition Overview report, you can look at your “Email” source, and see things like bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session, and finally how many conversions may have come from emails in this time period. You can even dive deeper into your Landing Page report and sort by your Email source to see even more information about specific pages included in your email and the performance. Combined with the information you gathered from your original click-through report in your email marketing platform, you have a better idea of what content performs well and what doesn’t.
Read more: What content to include in your email marketing.
Sending Emails at the Right Time
When is the best time to send an email campaign?
We advise testing different days and times when sending emails as this can be a critical missed step. Some people may respond better to a particular day and time and that’s something that B2B marketers only learn through various email tests. Tuesday mornings through Thursday mornings are the best times to send emails, which takes into account any Monday holiday breaks and extra time off on Fridays. An email that you think performs well on a Tuesday at 8 AM may perform even better on Thursday at 10 AM. Also, consider that you may have clients in different time zones and adjust your email send time accordingly.
Read more: Email marketing design optimized for conversions.
Knowing Your Unsubscribe Rate
Generally speaking, an unsubscribe rate below 0.5% for an email campaign is normal for any email campaign (source: https://optinmonster.com/10-proven-ways-to-reduce-email-unsubscribe-rates/). Keep in mind, brand new lists can have a higher unsubscribe rate and that can be normal as well, especially with new B2B marketing email campaigns. These individuals may be familiar with your brand, but if you haven’t marketed to them specifically yet, the new emails might surprise them and cause higher than average unsubscribe rates. The quality of your list should improve over time as the highly interested and engaged audience sticks around. You should also experience a much lower unsubscribe rate as these readers grow familiar with your brand messaging.
Open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates vary from industry to industry. For example, a manufacturing company may see a 19.82% open rate and 2.18% click-through rate on average, while government-based B2B company could see much higher numbers, like 28.77% open rate and 3.99% click-through rate. (source: https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/)
Segmenting Your List Based on Audience Demographics
Now that you have a better idea of your list quality and audience demographics, you can start segmenting your list based on unique, but similar characteristics between contacts.
For example, if you have a particular product or service that only affects one industry, you can segment these individuals in your list and send them a personalized email with blog content or downloadable resources they will find more useful than your general list of contacts.
Segmenting contacts can also improve open and click-through rates as the more you can target specific individuals, the more focused your content is, and the more personalized this feels to users. Do you have names or company information for your contacts? You can even add merge tags to personalize emails even further. Most B2B email marketing providers allow you to add a tag like |*FNAME*| in MailChimp, that allows you to dynamically insert a contact’s name into the email, giving your emails a personalized touch. This level of personalization can go a long way in terms of engaging your contacts with the right content at the right time.
Read more: 10 tips to create content your audience will devour.
To recap, data is your ally so make sure you are utilizing it to your advantage. Open, unsubscribe and click-through rates are all digestible data points you can utilize to fine-tune your approach and get your brand in front of more of its target market. Timing and segmentation are ways to demonstrate a more personalized approach to your email communications so you can connect with the reader.
